Thomas Vollrath, 1-grid CEO has announced the building of their first data centre facility in Paarden Eiland, Cape Town. “The facility will be utilised as our head office, retrofitting the ground floor with our data centre”.
Vollrath provides that “the new centre will be structured to provide a 100-cabinet capacity. Infrastructure upgrades are underway to cater for the facility’s power requirements”.
The investment in the data centre was based on increased demand of cloud computing and will contribute to future company growth. The business will benefit from control over data, security, operations and the environment.
Eco-friendly data centre
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The plans of the new data centre will consider green alternatives such as solar panels as an additional energy source. Passive free air cooling has been tabled however due to the centre being located near the ocean, the interference of salt erosion may arise, thus filtering alternatives are being evaluated.
Improvements in server technology, specifically server virtualization, has also delivered substantial improvements in data centre power consumption while reducing data centre costs. Currently servers are not only more powerful and efficient but through enhanced data management practices, the total capacity may be utilised.
Impact of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of a digital footprint for entrepreneurs. As a South African hosting provider, we have been able to assist thousands of businesses with this transition. The results of COVID-19 have affirmed the importance of investing in our data centre to expand and optimize our offerings to our customers.
The completion date, initially scheduled for Q3 of 2021, will experience a 5-month delay as a result of the pandemic. Jonathan Shiffman, 1-grid DevOps Lead adds that, “the laying of new cables from the station located in Paarden Eiland will see a delay as a result of delays in City approval”. The revised completion date is scheduled for Q4 2021.
Impact of load shedding
In the time of a pandemic, load shedding has placed additional pressure on businesses. The data centre will ensure reliability, consisting of two generators that are specified to run 72 hours on generator power. These can run indefinitely based on their ability to refuel.
“The new infrastructure is an investment as it is well aligned with the company vision and growth strategy”, Vollrath adds that the company has shown favourable growth since the transition of Gridhost to 1-grid and therefore the plan to build a data centre has arisen earlier than expected. We are looking forward to developing the data centre and providing our customers with dedicated 1-grid employees to provide optimal customer service and overall DC management.
Pity they can’t provide a solution that works.